As they left, they could hear Jonah: “Fakes an injury to get out of mopping up the really disgusting parts. I thought I’d taught that boy better…”
Anna half filled one of the metal basins from the water on the woodstove and washed and disinfected Ridley’s hand in the kitchen sink. “So what’s with you and Bob?” she asked, since she held him captive. She’d cooled the water from the stove with the drinking water in the second bathroom. Using the dipper, she ladled it over the cut.
He flinched.
“Sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“Not too bad.”
The cut was deep but not long. “You don’t seem to much like Bob,” she prodded.
“He’s not a real likable guy,” Ridley said.
“Why did you want him to do the study evaluation?” She closed the gash with butterflies and patted his hand dry with paper towels.
Ridley took his hand back though she’d not yet bandaged it. “He came highly recommended,” he said curtly.
The conversation was over but Anna’d found out a great deal. Aggressively avoiding a topic broadcasts just how emotionally charged that topic is. Why was a mystery, but if the snow kept up she was going to need something to do to pass the time for the next five weeks. And it would keep her mind off whatever it was with very big teeth and very big feet that was stalking the island.
She retrieved his hand and wrapped his palm with narrow gauze to keep it clean, then released him into the wild, wondering if, like Androcles, she’d made a friend. He went to his room and closed the door. Anna put her coat back on and headed for the carpenter’s shed. The play being enacted in the shop might have a plot closer to
It wasn’t the only soap opera, however.
Muffled in the saber rattle of winter branches and the fierce drive of the wind, and cloaked in the growing dusk, Anna was nearly on top of Bob and his graduate student before she saw them. They didn’t see her. Anna didn’t hide exactly or eavesdrop exactly; she just didn’t call attention to herself.
Katherine was crying. “He was such a beautiful wolf.”
Anna heard the words wailed on the wind, then the storm took the rest. After hours of slicing and dicing, pickling and bagging, all of a sudden Katherine was mourning her wolf. Bob said something, then Katherine hit him. She didn’t slap or punch; she hit his well-padded, parka-clad chest with her fists the way helpless heroines in old movies did.
Bob had seen the movies too. He caught both of her wrists. He wore heavy gloves; Katherine was bare-handed. Anna tensed, waiting to see if she would have to intervene. Observing the escalation of violence was drummed into park rangers. Katherine could hit Bob all she wanted – she wasn’t doing him any damage – but should he, with his height and weight advantage, strike back, he had to be taken down. Anna had no idea how she would do that. It would be like taking down the Pillsbury Doughboy on steroids.
Katherine jerked free and ran. In seconds, she was out of sight behind a curtain of snow and a scrim of trees.
The little drama had been played out within ten yards of the kitchen door against the glamorous backdrop of the outhouse. Bob didn’t chase after Katherine; he turned and plowed toward the bunkhouse. Anna faded back into the trees and turned her back. The parka she’d bought off the Internet for this excursion was white, the ski pants black. Unless he was looking hard, Bob wouldn’t see her.
Bob closed the door behind him. Anna continued to the shop. Mopping up blood and guts with a fistful of newspapers, Jonah was singing: “A spoon full of sugar makes the medicine go down, the medicine go down.”
The wind snatched the door from Anna and banged it open. “Is everyone on this island insane?” she asked.
“All but for me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee,” Jonah replied. He had small, even teeth, and when he smiled the hairs of his cropped white beard bristled out like the whiskers of an interested cat. It was hard not to smile back but Anna managed.
“What is going on around here?” she demanded.
“Unless I observe things from two hundred feet aboveground, they don’t make much sense to me,” Jonah admitted cheerfully and shoved the mess into a garbage bag. “Katherine was doing her thing. Bob split for the house. ‘Wine time’ comes earlier in the north, I guess. Then Ms. Huff starts sniffling and snuffling. She jams half a dozen vials of blood-filled vacuum tubes in her pocket and runs out after him.”
“Robin?”
“She left between the two. Headed for the bunkhouse, I guess. Even our delightful, delicious bi-athlete wouldn’t want to go out in this weather.”
Anna ignored the “delightful, delicious” and helped him with the cleaning up.
DINNER, THE SACRED COOKING RITE presided over by the lead researcher, didn’t happen. Ridley took his laptop into the room he shared with Jonah. Robin climbed into her sleeping bag for a nap. Bob took a coffee cup of boxed red wine and two peanut butter sandwiches into the room he shared with Adam and closed the door.
Being alone, or what passed for it in cabin fever country, hit Anna like a couple of Xanax on an empty stomach. Her shoulders dropped an inch, her lungs filled and she realized she’d been clenching her jaw most of the day. There were some for whom being with others of their kind was energizing. For Anna, it was as if her fellow human beings sucked the marrow from her bones if incarcerated with them too long. To a majority of felons serving time in the federal penitentiaries, the threat of going to prison did not – and, should they get out, would not – deter them from a life of crime. Even as a little girl, for Anna the mere thought of being locked in with people, having her life regulated by others, had been enough to keep her from pocketing so much as a penny candy at Idaho’s Grocery.
In the unpeopled space, her mind unfolded like the wings of a bird kept too long in a small cage and her body relaxed into the fatigue left over from her dip in Intermediate Lake. She stretched out on the sofa nearest the fire and slept.
When she awoke two hours later, she was still alone, and she felt better than she had in three days. She sat up straight, settled her shoulders and commenced to find at least a few answers.
Ridley had a laptop, as did Katherine and Bob, but there was another computer, an old clunker that the biotechs who rotated through each winter had for their use. Anna got online and Googled Robert Menechinn. He was born in Canada and started his academic career in Manitoba. He’d gotten his B.A. at the University of Manitoba. He’d gotten an M.A. at the University of Winnipeg. Where the Ph.D. was obtained wasn’t mentioned. All three degrees were in education, nothing in the natural or zoological sciences. The first connection with wolves was at the University of Western Ontario. When he was a lecturer there, he had taught “Education in Green” to students working on a project studying wolves. The “Green,” Anna surmised, meant ecologically hip, how the neophyte researchers could teach others about their work.
From Ontario, he’d gone to the University of Saskatchewan, from there to New York, then to Virginia and finally to Bethesda, Maryland, where he now taught “Education in the Sciences” along with several other classes that barely qualified him to lick the wolf scat off Ridley’s mukluks when it came to a wilderness study of actual animals.
Anna could see how he might have gotten his name on one government list or another. He was a self- promoter. Every award or commendation he’d ever received was on every Web site that mentioned him. As a fish, he was too small to warrant such coverage. He’d had to provide the information unasked. More likely one of his graduate students did it for him. That could have impressed some government flunky sufficiently that Bob was put on the list for the ISRO evaluation, then Ridley recommended him.
She leaned back and stared at the screen without seeing it.
Menechinn was forty-six; he’d gotten his B.A. at twenty-five. In a couple of decades, he’d worked in eight colleges and universities. Had this been a Park Service resume, and the star of the piece not at least a deputy superintendent by the end of the story, she would have read it to mean Bob was a troublemaker or had severe adult-onset attention deficit disorder. It had the earmarks of an employee that nobody wants the trouble of firing so
